Event management techniques for use in a computer system comprising an event generating component generating at least one event and a plurality of event handling components applying one or more business process rules in response to the event. In one embodiment of the invention, an event generation component provides to an event handling component a notification of an event and context information about the event, in the same communication. The context information may provide all the information necessary for the event handling component to apply one or more business policy rules to determine how to handle the event. In some implementations having multiple event handling components of different types, the event generating component may be configured to provide notification of events to the event handling components in a specified order. In some implementations, multiple event handling components may be joined in a logical pool, sharing responsibility for handling events.